Informatics

Email Scams – To be Proactive rather then Protective.

Ahmad Ladhani — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:22:25 +0000

Technology have catch a drastic pace in past 15 years, and one of the benefit of these technological developments is world become a Global Village.
By Ahmad Ladhani

Communication between people in distinct race and language become possible. People become more informed and hence this liberation of communication makes them free from seclusion, but this freedom of advancement also has a price to pay in form of scams.

Now day’s Electronic Mail or simply email is the most significant part of our life and hence email scams are flourished healthily. Email scams or spams normally look like an ordinary email contains proposals, invitations of monetary benefits. Scammers use email, online ads, pop ups, and search results to trick you into sending them money and personal information. The emails include advance-fee scams, charity scams, compensation scams, fake job offer scams, FBI scams, fraud recovery scams, investment scams, loan scams, lottery scams, malware scams, phishing scams, romance scams, secret shopper scams etc.

The Email Service providers feel the same and make necessary improvements in the account’s security measures by putting advance Spam Guard or SSL. People affected with those emails somehow, believing them true. It’s not their fault as the format and the return address seems to be accurate making them believing those scam mails.

Below is the example of the scammed email which I have found in my Junk mail box. I deliberately remove my email address and the timings of the email.

________________________________________________________________

From:   BMTChemicals CC (info@bmtchem.co.za)
Sent:    Tuesday, April 30, 2013 0:00:00 AM/PM
To:       xyz@abc.com

Dear Sir/Madam,

I’M Goodman Chambers, the Sales Manager of (BMTChemicals CC), the major producer of Chemicals products in South Africa.

We are looking for a trustworthy representative in Pakistan that can help as a link between our company and our client over there.we would like to know if you are interested to work from home for us and earn up to 2,000 to 3,500 usd. weekly for your services.

(BMTChemicals CC) needs a book-keeper or representative in Pakistan,so we want to know if you will like to work from home and get paid weekly without leaving or affecting your present job?

Our company produces Chemical materials, batiks, assorted fabrics and traditional costumes.We have clients we supply goods weekly in Pakistan and our clients make payments for our supplies every week in form of money orders and Bank Transfar which are not cashable here in South Africa, so we need someone in Pakistan to work as our representative to assist us in processing payments from our clients and we will pay him/her weekly wage.

All you need to do is to receive this payment from our clients in Pakistan on behalf of our company and get it cashed at your bank then deduct your 10% and forward the balance to our company here in South Africa.

BELOW IS A LETTER OF EMPLOYMENT FORM OF OUR COMPANY WHICH YOU HAVE TO REPLY AS SOON AS WE CONFIRM ANY PAYMENT COMING TO YOU, I WILL LET YOU KNOW AND I WILL GIVE YOU THE NECESSARY INFORMATION NEEDED FOR THE TRANSFER OF THE COMPANY BALANCE.YOU COULD JUST FILL IT OUT THIS FORM BELOW.

APPLICATION FORM
1.Full Names:—————–
2.House Address:—————–
3.City:—————–
4.Phone Number:—————–
5.Country: —————–
6.Occupation: —————–
7.Age: —————–

Thank you as we await your further response.
In Trust And Good Faith

Goodman Chambers,

BMTChemicals CC

http://www.bmtchem.co.za

22 Venda Rd
Sebenza
Johanneburg
Gauteng.

________________________________________________________________

The email address and the format of the email is so decent and professional look alike but the email is scammed. Following are some measures to check whether the email is scammed or not.

The easiest way to fight spam or scammed emails to ignore them. Spam will end when it is no longer profitable. Spammers will see their profits tumble if nobody buys from them (because you don’t even see the junk emails). But its usually not work for some people because they don’t set their junk email filter on to exclusive, resulting their mostly emails goes to the junk folder and they have to navigate the folder in order to check them.
Another way is to report the spammer to their ISP. Finding their true ISP address is not easy as they usually hide them. Fortunately, there are tools like SpamCop that make reporting spam correctly to the right address easy.
We can identify the scammed mail through the email Header and their Body of the Mail. Usually the ‘from:’ line has set to be the sender’s address. This makes sure you know who the message is from and can reply easily, but spammer knows that the receiver of the email will contact him/her so they usually hide their email address and use fictitious email address.
So the header method wont worked but the headers of every email message also contains Received: lines in which we can figure out the IP address of the email sender. Normally when a message being forwarded or send through a server, it adds the IP address and server name of the machine from which the message being sent in the received line.
We can Google the part of the text/email like a line or two, to check the results and see whether this email ever being reported or not. This ensures that the email is forged or not.

Hope these measures help you figuring out the scammed mail and not become the victim of fraudulent acts of scammers.

Harvard recognises Quranic verse as one of the greatest expressions of justice

Ahmad Ladhani — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:02:39 +0000

Harvard Law School, one of the most prestigious institutions of its kind in the world, has posted a verse of the Holy Quraan at the entrance of its faculty library, describing the verse as one of the greatest expressions of justice in history.

Verse 135 of Surah Al Nisa (The Women) has been posted at a wall facing the faculty’s main entrance, dedicated to the best phrases articulating justice:

“O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah , even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives. Whether one is rich or poor, Allah is more worthy of both. So follow not [personal] inclination, lest you not be just. And if you distort [your testimony] or refuse [to give it], then indeed Allah is ever, with what you do, Acquainted”

According to a Saudi daily, a Saudi student who studies at Harvard first highlighted the development when he published a picture of the display on his Twitter page.

Read complete article from Source

Women day Greetings

Ahmad Ladhani — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:33:11 +0000

My Calligraphic Art Work – Ahmad Ladhani

Ahmad Ladhani — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:52:30 +0000

*Image size: 1024×768 pixels. click on the image for Zoom-In view

Another tryout on Calligraphic Vector Art made by me. Its still have some errors and some finishing mistakes but as per me its best of mine .

So I thought I should share it with you all.

Regards all

Ahmad Ladhani

Let the baby cry for a Good, goodnight sleep – Study

Ahmad Ladhani — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 06:30:00 +0000

It will be music to the ears of those who lobby their loved-ones in vain to ‘just leave the baby’. And it will be a red rag to those who view letting a baby cry itself to sleep as a cruel 1950s throwback.
By Stephen Adams

For academics claim to have shown that letting an infant cry itself to sleep is the best way to ensure a good night’s rest for all. While most babies sleep through five or six night a week by the age of six months, according to the study by American psychologists, a third continue to wake much more frequently until they are toddlers. They looked at sleep patterns in 1,200 children from birth to three years and found ‘wakers’ tended to be boys. They also tended to be breast fed.

The research was led Marsha Weinraub, professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. She concluded that babies should be left to go to sleep on their own – even if that meant they cried for a bit. Doing so enabled them to learn how to “self soothe” and settle themselves to sleep on their own, which also gave frazzled parents a break, she argued. She said: “These data support those parenting practices that foster children learning to go back to sleep on their own, without nursing, without being held, and eventually learn to self-comfort. This is really hard for some babies.

“And it’s even harder for parents.” However, she continued: “If parents what their children to learn to sleep through the night, they need to allow their children to learn to return to sleep after awakening. This may require parents to not respond when their children awaken and call out or cry, especially after nine or 10 months of age. If the parent knows that the child is safe and just needs help falling asleep, it may be best to let the child learn to return to sleep on their own.”

She said: “The best advice is to put infants to bed at a regular time every night, allow them to fall asleep on their own and resist the urge to respond right away to awakenings. “When mothers tune in to these night time awakenings or if a baby is in the habit of falling asleep during breastfeeding, then he or she may not be learning to how to self-soothe, something that is critical for regular sleep.” Babies that awoke lots created “problems” for mothers “and other family members”, she said.

As a result parents of such children “might be encouraged to establish more nuanced and carefully targeted routines to help babies with self-soothing and to seek occasional respite”. Writing in the journal Developmental Psychology, she and colleagues said they also found that mothers of babies who woke persistently were more likely to be depressed. The babies themselves were more likely to be irritable. However, she admitted their research could not tease out cause and effect. Were their mothering techniques leading to poorer sleep and hence maternal depression? Or did pre-existing depression mean such mothers could not bear to leave their babies to cry?

Prof Weinraub’s advice tallies with that of baby gurus such as Gina Ford, author of The New Contented Little Baby Book. Ford advocates a rigid approach towards bedtimes that includes letting the baby settle alone for a time – a technique called ‘controlled crying’ – and a ‘no eye contact’ rule while settling them. However, Ford has frequently been attacked as unloving, with critics frequently pointing out that she is a maternity nurse who has never had a child of her own. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, bravely entered the fray three years ago, likening her methods to “a sort of Ikea assembly instruction manual” that advocated sticking a child “in a broom cupboard”.

For that he earned Ford’s rebuke that his comments were “sad …coming from a supposedly intelligent man”. Proponents of ‘attachment parenting’ see letting babies cry themselves to sleep as a form of neglect that could lead to long-term psychological damage. The same year Penelope Leach wrote in her book The Essential First Year: “It is potentially damaging to leave babies to cry.”

It generated high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, she said, which over time “neuro-biologists say is toxic to the human brain”. This May, a University of North Texas study was published bearing this out – although it was led by a member of the Attachment Parenting International Research Group. Both sides of the debate – or rather argument – wield academic studies as weapons in a fight that is unlikely to end soon.

The NHS Choices website proposes that parents “could try” to “teach your child to get back to sleep by themselves”, by leaving them for five to 10 minutes at a time. ”It might take a week or two but if you keep the routine going, your child should start falling asleep on their own,” it encourages. It adds: “Tackle it together. If you have a partner, agree between you how to tackle your child’s sleeping problems. ”You don’t want to try to decide what to do in the middle of the night. If you’ve both agreed what’s best for your child, it’ll be easier to stick to your plan.”

For some couples, such agreement is likely to be a tall order

Source

We Forget so we remember – Study

Ahmad Ladhani — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:00:31 +0000

Researchers report new findings on how the human brain retains what is most important, and avoids being overwhelmed by trivia.
By Lee Dye

We accumulate so many memories that it’s a wonder our brains don’t clog, strangling us on the trivia of our daily lives. How do we recall the memories that are important to us without flooding our brains with the details of every insignificant event? How do we separate the memories we need from the mountains of garbage? According to ongoing research, we separate the wheat from the chaff by shutting down some memories, at least temporarily, to allow that one chosen treasure to resurface. In short, we forget, so we can remember.

New research into “retrieval-induced forgetting,” an awkward phrase that is easily forgotten, is reshaping much of what we have known about how memories are organized and retrieved. Psychologists Benjamin C. Storm of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Robert A. Bjork of UC Berkeley, along with other cognitive scientists around the world, have produced some potentially game-changing results.

In laymen’s language, the research suggests the healthy human brain comes equipped with something like a super-smart Web browser. A cue that should trigger the retrieval of a specific memory also allows the browser temporarily to suppress many memories that are similar to the target, but not precise enough. The beauty of such a system, if it continues to be validated by other research, is that it would allow us to recall positive memories, which we prefer over negative memories, so every cue doesn’t dredge up sad or heartbreaking remembrances. Yet even the saddest memories remain buried in our brains, and the temporary suppression that keeps them from constantly resurfacing doesn’t bury them forever. They are suppressed, but not totally forgotten.

The research is based chiefly on word association. A cue of automobile-red, for example, may remind someone of their father’s red Oldsmobile, but not necessarily of the tragic accident that killed him. Storm and a colleague, Tara A. Jobe of the University of Illinois at Chicago, conducted a series of experiments, and report the results in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science. The first experiment allowed them to determine how efficient each participant was at suppressing — or forgetting, as they prefer to call it some memories to facilitate recalling a specific memory. Surprisingly, the participants were unable to recall word associations they had practiced as well as words they had not practiced, indicating some inhibiting mechanism was at work.

That experiment allowed them to evaluate each participant’s level of “retrieval-induced forgetting.” Those who scored well had an especially effective “browser,” while others were only mediocre, and some were even weaker. The participants were then instructed to recall an autobiographical memory something that they experienced personally. ”There is a positivity bias in autobiographical memory such that people are more likely to remember positive events from their past than they are to remember negative ones,” the scientists said, and much other research supports that.

The memories recalled by the participants suggest a very significant role for “retrieval-induced forgetting.” ”Participants who exhibited lower levels of retrieval-induced forgetting (weak browser) recalled significantly more negative memories” than participants with a strong browser, the study concluded.

Source

Practiced to be a perfect lier – study

Ahmad Ladhani — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 05:21:17 +0000

By Tia Ghose

The more you practice a lie, the better you get at it, say the results of a new study.

Published Nov. 12 in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Science, the study found that, after 20 minutes of practicing their cover story, liars could respond just as quickly and easily to lies as to the truth. Moreover, they were no more likely to slip-up on falsehoods than on the truth. ”After a short time of training, people can be very efficient at lying,” said Xioaqing Hu, a study co-author and psychology doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. “The difference between lying and being honest has been eliminated after the training.”

Though people lie for myriad reasons, it’s no easy task. Lying takes a lot of brainpower because it requires holding contradictory information in mind (the truth and the lie), while inhibiting the urge to tell the truth. Children are terrible liars and only improve as they mature. And several studies have found that people take longer to tell a lie than to tell the truth. ”Lying is a difficult, because honesty is the default communication mode,” Hu told LiveScience.

But past studies mostly tested people’s ability to offer a deception with no practice. In real life, criminals usually practice and perfect their alibis before facing a police interrogation. [ 10 Interesting Facts About the Brain ] Hu and his colleague wanted to see how lying changed with practice. They asked 16 people to essentially play at espionage by remembering three facts for a false identity: their new name, a new date of birth and a new hometown.

Researchers then asked volunteers to answer a question (“Is this true of you?”) for different facts about their true self, and to press a “yes” or “no” button in response, while the researchers measured response time and accuracy. The liars were then asked to practice lying by pressing “yes” whenever a fact from their false identity appeared and “no” when true details were presented. (A control group of 16 people performed the same trial, but answered yes to the truth.)

After 270 trials, or about 20 minutes of training, liars were indistinguishable from truth-tellers on accuracy and response time. ”We think that, psychologically, the people basically learned that this is not me and the fake identity is me,” Hu said. The team is currently studying whether other measures of lying, such as polygraph machines or EEG brain wave measurements, can reveal practiced deception, or whether lies are completely undetectable using current methods, he said.

The findings have implications not just for would-be criminals, but also for lie-detection research, which usually attempts to spot deception immediately after a person is asked to lie. ”But in the real world, after a crime, there is usually a delay between the crime and the interrogation,” giving the criminal a chance to practice their falsehood, he said. Hu’s team is currently studying whether people can improve their lies when asked to provide a false memory of events — for instance, when creating an alibi after a burglary.

Source

My Third Calligraphic Art Work – Ahmad Ladhani

Ahmad Ladhani — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 18:56:07 +0000

*Image size: 700×450 pixels. click on the image for Zoom-In view

This is my Third tryout on Calligraphic Vector Art made by me. It still have some errors and some finishing mistakes but as per me its best of mine .

So I thought I should share it with you all.

Regards all

Ahmad Ladhani

Previous Articles: 
My Second Ever Islamic Art Work – Ahmad Ladhani
My First Ever Islamic Art Work – Ahmad Ladhani

Aga Khan museum being built near Don Mills and Eglinton in Toronto

Ahmad Ladhani — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 12:58:47 +0000

Ten things Toronto can look forward to in 2013

One year ends, a new one arrives, and with it hopes for something better. However irrational, that is the expectation for 2013 — that things will improve for Toronto. Let’s face it, 2012 wasn’t the city’s finest year. Which is not to say that we will get our civic act together, but here are a few of the things we’re looking forward to in the 12 months ahead, in no particular order:

Occupying a large suburban site at Eglinton Ave. E. and Wynford Dr., the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Center will transform this part of Toronto. Already the magnificent complex is turning heads — for now, mostly those watching as they drive by on the northbound DVP. When complete, its effect will be felt across the city. The architects including Fumihiko Maki and Charles Correa have created a place of surpassing beauty. As an act of faith in Toronto, a gift to the city, the center is unparalleled. |…|

Continue reading through Source

On Facebook – Negative vs Positive

Ahmad Ladhani — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 10:15:57 +0000

When his father died, Doug Anter of Royal Oak, Mich., called key family members, then put the news on Facebook.
By Christina Valhouli

LIKE many women these days, Aran Hissam, 35, of Melbourne, Fla., posted the news that she was pregnant on Facebook. On the morning of an ultrasound last year, she debated on the site whether to learn the baby’s sex, musing “to peek or not to peek?” When she failed to post an update later that day, friends started to contact her. Ms. Hissam decided to return to Facebook to share the news that her unborn baby, a girl, had been found to have fetal hydrops and given no chance of survival.

“I wanted to communicate the news to get people off my back,” Ms. Hissam said in a telephone interview recently. Although her husband was at first surprised that she would share such emotional news publicly, she said, Facebook seemed like one of the least difficult ways to get the word out.

“It was too draining to actually call everybody, because I couldn’t emotionally speak about the same thing over and over,” Ms. Hissam said, adding that she continued to post updates about her daughter, who was born at 35 weeks and lived for 15 hours, and it became a form of therapy for her.

Facebook, that repository of the mundane (mealtime updates, party reminders and job changes) that people have long used to show the positive sides of their lives, is increasingly also a place they go to break difficult news. It was where the race car driver Danica Patrick, 30, announced that she and her husband of seven years, Paul Hospenthal, 47, were “amicably” divorcing. And it is where a portrait photographer and mother of two named Alicia, 35 (who did not want her last name published because of continuing custody issues), posted a few succinct sentences about the breakup of her own marriage recently. People in her social circle were starting to hear rumors about her personal life, she said, and she wanted to address that.

“I didn’t want to start a pity party, but I did want to be honest about what was going on,” Alicia said, adding that making the announcement this way allowed her to control the message as well as avoid putting people on the spot. “One of the beautiful things about Facebook is that it’s passive communication, and it gives people freedom to respond or not in whichever way they are most comfortable.”

Posting bad news on a social media site eases the pain for the bearer of bad news and the recipient, because knowing what to say to someone who has just told you bad news can be one of the most socially fraught situations. “If you put the news on Facebook, you’re also maximizing the recipient’s comfort, so they can process the information on their own time,” said Dr. Janet Sternberg, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Ford-ham University. “It’s really hard to break bad news without crying or falling apart. But we can share painful news in less painful ways.”

Dr. Louis Manza, a professor and chairman of the psychology department at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, said: “From a cognitive perspective, it’s easier to deal with it this way. You post it, come back in eight hours and read all the comments that you get, and don’t have to worry about having a difficult conversation.”

Still, intimates might react poorly to finding out about delicate or tragic situations via pixels.

“Really significant news is best delivered face to face, but sometimes speed is the concern,” said Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette author and a spokesman for the Emily Post Institute. “ We’ve definitely crossed a threshold in how we use social media.”

The hand hovering ready to click the “Like” button can also create tremendously awkward situations.

“Ah, yes, the Facebook vocab challenge,” said Mr. Senning, who said it’s O.K. to “Like” negative news. “The ‘Like’ indicates an emotional connection, and indicates that you have read it.”

Doug Anter, 46, a public relations executive in Royal Oak, Mich., was hardly concerned about an excess of “Likes” when thinking about how to spread the word that his father had died in August. At the time he was also expecting his first child, so he was feeling highly emotional, and phoned key family members before ultimately putting the news about his father on Facebook.

“I could have made countless phone calls, but it was incredibly inefficient, and I would be getting very emotional each time,” he said. After he posted about his father, Mr. Anter said he felt “blessed and fortunate for the outpouring of support” that followed. But some experts think that putting bad news on Facebook almost inevitably trivializes it, to the sufferer’s further detriment.“If you post about someone’s death or your divorce, it’s not that different from typing, ‘I’m going to Starbucks,’ ” said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, Calif. When someone puts bad news on social media, she said, “it’s trying to show bravado, and pretending that you’re not devastated by the news. It isn’t good because if you don’t feel the feelings, it interferes with your grief.”

Dr. Lieberman said that it is far preferable to tell people in person, as “it is very human, very real and you have to deal with your feelings.” In Pre-Facebook days, she pointed out, we all had to make 50 difficult phone calls or ask friends and family to help and we all managed to do it.

Source

Alzheimer’s Disease Early Cognitive Problems Identified

Ahmad Ladhani — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 09:20:52 +0000

Written by Joseph Nordqvist

Early indicators of Alzheimer’s disease have been discovered and published in the latest issue of American Journal of Psychiatry. The findings reveal that people who are beginning to develop the disease often show problems with processing semantic and knowledge based information before severe symptoms of the disease begin showing.

The study is the first of its kind to review mild cognitive impairment (MCI) associated with Alzheimer’s disease in a systematic way and reveal the early indicators, signs and symptoms. Terry Goldberg, PhD, director of neurocognition at the Litwin Zucker Center for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease, and his colleagues developed a test to identify any problems with a person’s ability to process semantic or knowledge based information.

The results of the test showed that there are a number of semantic impairments that are associated with MCI. In order to prevent adding further confusion to the study, the researchers implemented an element of the test that did not require any verbal response. This part of the test measured a person’s ability to make a judgment of two sets of facts by their ability to differentiate size. For example, they would be shown a picture of an ant and a house and asked which was bigger. The time it took for them to answer the question would reveal the extent of their inability to process semantic information.

A total of 122 people were tested, of whom 25 had MCI, 27 had Alzheimer’s and the other 70 were cognitively “normal”. There was a big difference in the ability to process the information among the MCI and Alzheimer’s patients compared to the healthy controls. According to Dr. Goldberg: ”This finding suggested that semantic processing was corrupted. MCI and AD (Alzheimer’s disease) patients are really affected when they are asked to respond to a task with small size differences.”

The researchers then added an element to the task by showing the participants pictures of a big house and small ant and also a big ant and small house. The MCI and AD patients were able to successfully complete the first part of this task but had a lot difficulty (unable to answer or delayed response) when shown the picture where the big ant looked just as big as the small house. The patients with MCI were functioning better than the Alzheimer’s patients but not nearly as well as the healthy controls.

They used the UCSD Skills Performance Assessment scale to determine how much of an effect impaired semantic processing has on carrying out everyday functions. It assesses stuff like a person’s ability to organize day trips out and write complex checks. The authors of the study said: “The semantic system is organized in networks that reflect different types of relatedness or association. Semantic items and knowledge have been acquired remotely, often over many repetitions, and do not reflect recent learning.”

This indicates that it could well be possible to repair semantic processing connections through training. According to Dr. Goldberg: “It tells us that something is slowing down the patient and it is not episodic memory but semantic memory.”

Source

Spectroscopy make Breast Cancer Diagnosis easy

Ahmad Ladhani — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 08:56:32 +0000

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD

The analysis of small deposits of calcium in breast tissue can help differentiate cancerous and benign tumors, but it is sometimes not easy to make such a diagnosis. Now a team of researchers in the US believes a new method that uses a special type of spectroscopy to locate calcium deposits during a biopsy, could greatly improve the accuracy of diagnosis.

The team, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), writes about the work that led them to this conclusion in a paper published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 24 December.

Calcium Deposits

Micro-calcification’s, or small deposits of calcium, form when calcium from the bloodstream deposits onto degraded proteins and fats left behind by injured and dying cells.

They can be a telltale sign of breast cancer, but most tumors that contain them are benign.

Microcalcifications are most often seen in breast tumors, but they can also occur, albeit rarely, in other types of cancer, says co-senior author Maryann Fitzmaurice, senior research associate and adjunct associate professor of pathology and oncology at CWRU, in a statement.

Calcification also plays a major role in atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.

Biopsy Can Be Long and Arduous Procedure

When microcalcifications show on a mammogram, doctors do a follow-up biopsy of the suspect tissue to test for cancer.

Figures show that in around 1 in 10 cases with such micro-calcification’s, the tumor is cancerous, so the follow-up biopsy is critical.

During the procedure, the radiologist takes X-rays from three different angles to locate the tiny calcium deposits, then inserts a needle into the tissue and removes up to 10 tissue samples.

A pathologist then tests these samples to see if they contain microcalcifications.

But in 15 to 25% of cases, it is not easy to locate and take a tissue sample accurately, resulting in an inconclusive diagnosis. This means the patient has to have more X-rays and undergo more invasive surgery to retrieve further samples.

But, as Fitzmaurice explains, this second attempt is rarely successful:

“If they don’t get them on the first pass, they usually don’t get them at all.”

“It can become a very long and arduous procedure for the patient, with a lot of extra X-ray exposure, and in the end they still don’t get what they’re after, in one out of five patients,” she adds.

New Method Uses Special Type of Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy is a way of determining the composition of a material by studying how it absorbs or scatters radiation such as light. It is often used in physical and analytical chemistry, and there are many applications now in medicine too.

One of the challenges in applying the technique to medicine is cost and speed: often the equipment is very expensive and slow to deliver results in “real time”.

For the past several years, the MIT and CWRU team has been working on overcoming this challenge to help the radiologist determine, in a matter of seconds, if the tissue contains microcalcifications or not.

At first they tried a method based on Raman spectroscopy, which uses light to measure energy shifts in molecular vibrations, revealing precise molecular structures. The advantage of this method is that it is very accurate at identifying microcalcifications. But the disadvantage is the equipment is expensive and the analysis takes a long time.

In this latest study, the researchers describe how they turned to another method, called “diffuse reflectance spectroscopy”, and found it gave results just as accurately as Raman spectroscopy, but much faster and at less cost.

Co-lead author Narahara Chari Dingari, a postdoc at MIT, says:

“With our new method, we could obtain similar results with less time and less expense.”

97% Success Rate with Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy

Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy collects and analyzes light after it has interacted with the sample. This gives a unique “spectrographic signature”.

In their PNAS paper, the authors describe how they examined 203 tissue samples within minutes of their removal from 23 patients.

Each sample could be one of three types, each with its own spectrographic signature. It could be healthy, it could contain lesions with no microcalcifications, or it could contain lesions with microcalcifications.

By analyzing these patterns, the team produced a computer algorithm that showed a success rate of 97% in identifying tissue with microcalcifications.

Jaqueline Soares, another lead author and MIT postdoc, suggests the changes in the way the different tissues absorb light are probably due to altered levels of specific proteins (elastin, desmosine and isodesmosine) that are often cross-linked with calcium deposits in diseased tissue.

Simple Technology with High Accuracy Is a “Good First Step”

James Tunnell is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Texas and was not involved in the study. He describes the study as a “good first step” toward a system that could have a big impact on breast cancer diagnosis.

“This technology can be integrated into the system that is already used to take biopsies. It’s a very simple technology that can get the same amount of accuracy as more complicated systems.”

The team envisages their technique being used by radiologists to provide enhanced “real time” guidance to current biopsy procedures.

Source

New Year Greetings

Ahmad Ladhani — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 19:00:48 +0000

Imamat Day Greetings

Ahmad Ladhani — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 10:43:01 +0000

Beating Your Kids Increases Their Risk of Mental Illness – Study

Ahmad Ladhani — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:02:30 +0000

Children who are pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped or hit are more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness. Just one more reason to embrace alternative forms of discipline.
By Bonnie Rochman

What if we, as a society, could cut down on the incidence of mental illness by backing away from hitting, grabbing or pushing our children?

That’s a prospect raised by a new study in Pediatrics, which finds that harsh physical punishment increases the risk of mental disorders — even when the punishment doesn’t stoop to the level of actual abuse. What qualifies as appropriate punishment is a hot-button topic among parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes corporal punishment, but studies have shown that up to 80% of parents report that they rely on it to some extent. What constitutes physical punishment is also wide-ranging: everything from a light slap on the hand to an all-out whipping with a belt or a paddle.

“In the general population, there is a belief that physical punishment is O.K. as long as you’re not doing it in anger and you’re a warm and loving parent,” says Tracie Afifi, the study’s author and an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba in Canada. “But there’s no data supporting that.”

Afifi and colleagues decided to examine five forms of physical punishment — pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping and hitting that took place in the absence of even more severe acts of abuse or neglect such as punching, burning, physical neglect or sexual abuse. Other related research has not specifically included or excluded more severe types of abuse, meaning that the abuse — and not the grabbing or slapping — may be driving the relationship between physical punishment and mental disorders. She did not examine spanking because it’s not easy to define: what’s considered spanking varies from parent to parent. But, she says, “a push is a push, and a grab is a grab.”

In the study, researchers analyzed more than 20,000 people in the U.S. who were age 20 or older: 1,258 who had experienced pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping and hitting sometimes or very often, and 19,349 who reported they had experienced it rarely or never. They adjusted results for gender, race, marital status, education and a history of family dysfunction; if the person’s parents had drug problems or were hospitalized for mental illness, that could have affected their use of physical punishment.

Across the board, people who’d experienced physical punishment were more likely to experience nearly every type of mental illness examined. Their risk of mood disorders, including depression and mania, was 1.5 times greater than people who hadn’t been slapped or grabbed. The risk of depression alone was 1.4 times greater, which was the same rate for anxiety. People who’d been physically punished were 1.6 times more likely to abuse alcohol, and 1.5 times more likely to abuse drugs.

There’s going to be lot of people that think that a parent absolutely needs to use physical force to raise a compliant child,” says Afifi. “It’s pretty well established that physical abuse has a negative impact on mental health, but this is showing the same effect even when you look at milder forms of physical force. This is saying that physical punishment should not be used on children of any age.”

George Holden, a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who published research last year on the first real-time study of parents physically disciplining their kids, says Afifi’s findings fit into a “large constellation” of studies that show children whose parents use physical force are at greater risk for depression and anxiety. “This is yet another study documenting that this practice can result in unintended negative consequences,” says Holden. “Other studies have shown corporal punishment in childhood carries over to adulthood in terms of aggression, so there’s no reason why it wouldn’t in the area of mental health.”

Afifi hopes that “reasonable” parents will read about her research and decide to swear off physical punishment. Pediatricians can be part of the solution, talking to parents about alternative methods. “It’s never too late to stop,” she says, though she acknowledges a “cultural shift” needs to happen in order to turn the tide.

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If We Feel Too Busy, It’s Probably Due to Having Too Much Free Time

Ahmad Ladhani — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 19:35:33 +0000

A forthcoming study finds that keeping busy with selfless tasks greatly expands our perception of how much time we have.
By Christie Nicholson

Objectively time is constant. A minute is a minute. But when we have a lot to do, it usually feels like we have less time. Now a study finds an interesting wrinkle in time: when we busy ourselves withselfless tasks, time seems to expand. The work will be published the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers interrupted more than 200 students in class and asked them to complete different five-minute tasks. Some had to cross out the letter “e” in pages of text. Others wrote a letter to a sick child. When surveyed afterward, the group that wrote letters perceived themselves to have more time in general than those who did the crossing out.

In another experiment one group of subjects were given a period of free time to do whatever they wanted, while another group had to do something for someone else. Those who did something selflessly perceived themselves as having more time than those with no obligations. Those subjects also reported a stronger sense of personal power and effectiveness.

Many Americans have more leisure time today than ever before. Wouldn’t it be ironic if that all that free time contributes to the feeling that we have none?

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Why Women Say ‘I’m Sorry’ More Than Men Read more

Ahmad Ladhani — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 19:11:51 +0000

Women are more easily offended than men. In turn, they perceive more of their own behaviour as improper, requiring an apology.
By Eric Barker

Despite wide acceptance of the stereotype that women apologize more readily than men, there is little systematic evidence to support this stereotype or its supposed bases (e.g., men’s fragile egos). We designed two studies to examine whether gender differences in apology behavior exist and, if so, why.

In Study 1, participants reported in daily diaries all offenses they committed or experienced and whether an apology had been offered. Women reported offering more apologies than men, but they also reported committing more offenses. There was no gender difference in the proportion of offenses that prompted apologies. This finding suggests that men apologize less frequently than women because they have a higher threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior.

In Study 2, we tested this threshold hypothesis by asking participants to evaluate both imaginary and recalled offenses. As predicted, men rated the offenses as less severe than women did. These different ratings of severity predicted both judgments of whether an apology was deserved and actual apology behavior.

Primary Source: “Why Women Apologize More Than Men, Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior” from Psychological Science

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